Lessons from 4 Days without my Phone, by Ibraheem Dooba
POLITICS DIGEST- The title of this post should be “Lessons from Seven Days Offline and Four Days Without My Phone”.
You see, on Wednesday, 24 November 2021, my phone froze. So I applied the go-to hack for such error: The good old shutting down and switching on again.
Big mistake!
The phone never came back. I tried every trick I know for two days without success. So I ordered a new phone. When the new one arrived, the recovery of my email and social media accounts took a couple more days. This was mainly due to the security features I installed including the 2-step authentication.
For example, I attempted to log in to Facebook which sent a confirmation code to my email. But I couldn’t access the email because Gmail asked me to verify that I was the owner of the account. But I couldn’t because I was using the old phone to do the verification – which was now dead.
So what did I learn?
This is a lesson on ageing. Like their human owners, our electronic devices develop problems in their old age. The definition of old age for my phones, laptops and tablets is three years. Yours may be different depending on use. But I have only one phone and usually squeeze all the benefits it can offer out of its tiny heart.
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If the phone were a human being, it would have been an 80-year-old man whom I sent to work on the farm every day until his heart broke. Doctors tell us that we die when one or more of our organs fail. Of course, the upside of being an electronic device is that the part can be replaced. Then it would work for a bit before the old age factor kicks in again.
So what did I learn from four days without a phone?
In a TED talk, Sara DeWitt said that we pick up the phone within five minutes of waking up. Even more interesting is the fact that we look at our phones more than 50 times a day.
So, first, I felt relieved to be divorced from a tool that I had grown so dependent on. Those who know me know that I have phone phobia. I’m afraid of making calls and answering them. Instead, I use phones for tasks that they are not primarily meant for – such as writing. So I was temporarily cured of my phobia. But that is where the benefits end.
The demerits were numerous:
I couldn’t bank because the phone had become my bank. I couldn’t read, because the phone was in my library. I couldn’t write because the phone was my keyboard – and potentially lost eight articles in my 100 series. I write my newspaper columns, blog posts and even my books (at least the last three books) on the phone.
Indeed, my phone has completely replaced my laptop. Recently, two friends visited my house and one said to the other “he no longer uses a laptop. You would never find him without a laptop before.”
Further, I wasn’t encouraged to go for my morning walks because it’s the phone that tracks and count my steps. Since I didn’t have anything to be accountable for, I didn’t bother.
So I felt my productivity cut to almost zero.
Is it a good thing to be so dependent on these tools? I sincerely don’t know.
What do you think?
Series count: 71/100
